Afghans protest at Danish cartoons

Over a thousand protesters gathered in Mazar Shariff to protest against the republication of a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad in Danish newspapers, they also demanded the withdrawal of Danish and Dutch troops from Afghanistan. I don’t believe there is going to be any repercussion negatively affecting NATO troops in Afghanistan. If there was any it could have happened in the first round of print. But I do think it will negatively affect the image of the west in Afghanistan, while they are trying so hard to win the hearts and minds of Afghans in unwinnable battle against insurgency. The protesters, mostly religious clerics in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, also condemned plans by a right-wing Dutch politician to broadcast a film on the Koran.

I think the publication of cartoon shows how reconcilable Islam is with western secular values. In the west its seen as gesture to reemphasize western commitment to freedom of expression. In the muslim world its not about freedom of expression. It’s about the way of life. Afghanistan's Religious Affairs Ministry has called the reprinting of the cartoon as an attack against Islam. Several other Islamic countries have demanded that the film by the Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders must not be released.

I believe Afghans and muslims in general didn’t get the issue right. I don’t believe the publisher benefits from the muslim reaction but I do think there are circles which do. thus influencing public opinion in the West in aid of various political projects, for example to support further military intervention in the Middle East. In the west and specially in Europe the dispute is as one between Islam and freedom of expression.

The controversy was used to highlight a supposedly irreconcilable rift between Europeans and Islam. If the muslim world publishes insulting cartoons to Europe would Europe react like this. I don’t think so. as the journalist Andrew Mueller put it "I am concerned that the ridiculous, disproportionate reaction to some unfunny sketches in an obscure Scandanavian newspaper may confirm that ... Islam and the West are fundamentally irreconcilable"

The cartoon was republished in 130 newspapers in 49 other countries, not to humiliate muslims but as an act of support of free speech. Not only muslim nations saw it humiliating but countries with murky record of freedom like Belarus, Russia and south Africa also prohibited the cartoons or punished the publishers. What is bugging me is the reaction of moderate muslims protesting peacefully against conditional freedom of speech, requesting punishments and press control.

Afghan clerics and the government not only got the crisis wrong, as they usually do with crisis but they are also full of hypocrisy. The government budget and effectively Afghanistan is funded by countries that have published the cartoon. Why do you receive their charity while strongly oppose their values. Cartoon is another pretext for mullahs, as its for the right wing in the west, to strengthen their grip on society. Protests like today is solely the initiative of few mullahs and its primarily aimed at suppressing moderate elements of Afghan society, if such a thing exist:-)

Afghans in UK: Citizens, Settlers or Social Parasites?

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans live in Britain, most of them came here as refugees and has been awarded live to remain or British nationality. Most of them benefit from social welfare systems and public funding, with the integration of eastern European into EU, a larger poll of refugees are coming to Britain, better educated and less relying on social welfare. We are now conceptualizing Afghan immigrants at the points where our analysis privileges categories generated by European Union.

Figures of threat thus haunt the way we explain diasporic formations. this haunting, selectively, by investigating two figures of threat for immigrant theory: the parasite and the settler. The use of such figures ultimately insinuates several presumptions into analysis. One of these presumptions is most significant: that a diasporic community is ‘Other’ and, as such, is separate, separable, and isolable from a national people. The nation in Europe is now the continent, a European nation is more relevant today than a national. Instead of afghan labour its preferred to have polish labour. The forms of knowledge production that intersect domains of immigrant studies and the modern nation-state, thus, constitute immigrant as a particular kind of problem that needs to be dealt with. The new immigration schemes in Britain reflects this, its practically impossible for refugees to get to Britain overland today while most of afghans travelled to Britain via land ten years ago. Even for skilled worker its made several times difficult under the new scheme introduced in march 08.

This focus on immigrant-as-problem deflects our attention from more precise analysis of the nation-state’s relations to alterity. In contrast to normative models that focus on the settler and the parasite, the nation state sees the difference of immigrant as a threat and simultaneously desires to interpolate diasporic difference into a multicultural vision of the nation’s people. In other words, the underside of what is often seen as a diasporic threat is a vision of promise in possibility of liberal unity. This goes back to Britain paranoia of world war 2, Britain was scared of Fascism and promoting a mix society was state policy until recently. However, this figure of promise, which also works at the margins of immigrant theory, is highly problematic; it uncritically recuperates, on the one hand, a capitalist fantasy of productive labour and commodity circulation and, on the other, a nationalist fantasy wherein diasporic difference may be abstracted into national equivalence. In the face of new Europe and plenty of poor immigrants form eastern Europe this is proving more difficult. East Europeans are productive labour and its easier to abstract their cultural differences under pan European ambition.

Sexuality plays a critical role in these diverse processes of abstraction. Particularly significant is the presumption found within discourses of the nation-state that both the minority and majority communities proliferate through distinctive sexual norms, interdictions, and transgressions—in other words, what is operative here is a generalized hetero-normativity which is posited to move between and conjoin a national /European and a supposedly separate immigrant community. This is a stupid argument, This analytic is designed not only to reveal the hidden presumptions of ‘promise’ within figures of threat, but also to draw out another, perhaps more powerful, figure of alterity—not of the immigrant conceived of as the nation-state’s ‘other’(Tololyan, 1991), but of an otherness of the national/European people itself.

We can’t answer the question I posed as a title, I argue, in theory. Britian is entering into a new chapter of economic and social relation with Europe and it affects its long standing view of multiculturalism. Afghans in Britian needs to be studies to understand their social contribution.

Afghanistan: still a bleeding wound but this time the infection spreads to the West

An updated version of the United Nations threat map was published in June of 2006, showing rising danger levels for humanitarian workers in many parts of Afghanistan, areas which coloured solidly pink indicates "extreme risk."

this resembles like a bleeding wound, the blood has spread across afghanistan intensely since 2002. the bleeding wounds, those pink splotches on the UN maps have spread until they now dominate the country's south and east. The latest map, updated in December, shows 14 of 17 districts in Kandahar are entirely designated as extreme risk.

Even so, the statistics are bad. The United Nations's count of security incidents in Afghanistan last year climbed to 13 times the number recorded in 2003, and the UN forecasts even worse this year. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization says insurgent attacks increased 64 per cent from 2006 to 2007. In the first two months of this year, some analysts have noticed a
15- to 20-per-cent rise in insurgent activity compared with the same period last year, raising alarm about whether the traditional spring fighting season has started early.

The prospect of another year of rising bloodshed has forced a moment of reckoning among the Westerners. Almost everybody involved with Afghanistan is taking a hard look at the country's future, the mission is
increasingly a source of raucous debate in Canada and among its NATO allies; this is the sort of thing which worries me. i am not worried about westerners losing troops in the war but when they want to withdraw. lets hear it from an experienced old man, if i may reiterate my analogy, an experienced operator of afghan wound, a former Soviet generals have told the German government not to expand its engagement in Afghanistan and instead think about pulling out its troops. "More troops won't solve this problem, that's our experience. They only increase the tragedy," Lev Serebrov, a former Soviet army general and now a parliamentarian in the Russian Duma, said earlier this week in Berlin, according to the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. Germany, he said, shouldn't be thinking about sending more troops to Afghanistan, but "how it can pull out" of the country. A serving Russian military official, Gen. Ruslan Aushev, said the situation in Afghanistan reminded him strongly of the military operation the Soviet Union had in the country in the 1980s. "We were there for nearly a decade, first with a battalion, then with a division, then with 100,000 troops -- and in the end, we were forced to retreat,"

When managers from all the major humanitarian agencies in Kandahar gathered in a high-walled compound to swap war stories last month, it wasn't the tales of kidnappings and suicide bombs that caused the most worry. Nor was it the reports of insurgents enforcing their own brutal laws and executing aid workers. "The scary thing was, no foreigners attended the meeting," a participant said. "Everybody had evacuated."

Most aid organizations quietly withdrew their international staff from Kandahar in recent weeks, the latest sign that the situation here is getting worse. It's now almost impossible to spot a foreigner on the city streets, except for the occasional glimpse of a pale face in a troop carrier or a United Nations armoured vehicle.

At least the foreigners can escape. For many ordinary people the ramshackle city now feels like a prison, with the highways out of town regularly blocked by Taliban or bandits. Residents have even started avoiding their own city streets after dark, as formerly bustling shops switch off their colourful neon lights and pull down the shutters. There is rarely any electricity for the lights anyway, partly because the roads are too dangerous for contractors to risk bringing in a new turbine for a nearby hydroelectric generator.

Corrupt police prowl the intersections, enforcing a curfew for anybody without that night's password, or bribe money. The officers seem especially nervous these days, because the Taliban hit them almost every night with ambushes, rocket-propelled grenades or just a deceptively friendly man who walks up to a police checkpoint with an automatic rifle hidden under a shawl.

Insurgent attacks have climbed sharply in Kandahar and across the country. But some analysts believe the numbers don't capture the full horror of what's happening in Afghanistan's south and east. When a girl in a school uniform is stopped in downtown Kandahar by a man who asks frightening questions about why she's attending classes, that small act of intimidation does not appear in any statistics.

Kabul was roaring with activity as foreign aid poured into the capital, and the international community wanted to spread the prosperity into rural areas. It was widely believed that a few thousand troops could stabilize a province such as Kandahar.

In a blunt assessment this week, Vice-Admiral Michael McConnell, the U.S. intelligence czar, admitted that the Karzai government controls less than one-third of the country. The Taliban hold 10 per cent on a more-or-less permanent basis while the rest is run by local warlords, he said, describing the situation as deteriorating.

Influential US Senator, John Kerry, who was in Afghanistan last week, said Tuesday the Afghan Government has become disconnected and isolated. The government in Kabul has become somewhat disconnected, isolated, however you want to call it, from some of the provinces. And it's critical that that connection become robust, Kerry told reporters in Washington during a press conference on his trip to Afghanistan.

Even if villagers aren't afraid of the Taliban, many join up because they find the new government unpalatable. No regime has ever been overthrown at the ballot box in Afghanistan, so political opposition often becomes part of the insurgency.

Many Afghans view the government as a family business, reaping the spoils from foreign donors at the expense of those who don't belong to the well-connected tribes or family networks.

For rough comparison, NATO sent 40,000 troops into Kosovo - a place roughly one-quarter the size of Kandahar and with no active insurgency in 1999. More than one-third of them are still there eight years later. In fact, NATO has five times as many troops deployed in Kosovo as Canada has in Kandahar.

Comparisons with other insurgencies show a similar shortfall of soldiers in the Afghan war: Conflicts in Somalia, Malaysia, Sierra Leone, East Timor and Iraq all required far more troops per capita than NATO has devoted to Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's economic growth is also expected to continue slowing. Private investment was cut in half in 2007 compared with a year earlier, to about $500-million, and trade within the country will be hampered by Taliban and criminal roadblocks on the main highways.

Nearly everyone agrees, however, that Afghanistan will likely see rising violence in 2008. Two Western security analysts predicted that the year will bring increased sophistication in the Taliban's technology; they're likely to use so-called explosively formed penetrators for the first time, adopting a technique often used in Iraq to puncture even the most heavily armoured vehicle with a specially shaped explosive.

Afghanistan Dialogue: Imagine art after

Imagine art after was a project uniting artists who originate from the same country but who are now geographically and politically separated. The project brought together seven artists who left home and now live in London, and seven who remained in the country of their birth: the artist who left, and the artist who stayed. The aim of the project is to open lines of communication where they would otherwise not exist, enabling artists to exchange ideas and work, and also to discuss their experiences in a online forum.

The artists taking part come from countries whose people, according to the Home Office, make an unusually high number of applications for asylum in the UK, among them Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Serbia and Nigeria. As well as their work being exhibited online, each artist will take part in a dialogue with their partner for six weeks.

By communicating about their experience in two very different societies, it's hoped that the artists' conversations with each other will lend insight into how life and art interrelate, and how identity is shaped by notions of belonging.

There was an exhibition of their work in Tate until first week of January. Unfortunately I missed to see it.

I was listening to a report on BBC where the Afghan project was described as exposition of two men. Some dialogues were great success but the Afghanistan didn’t pick up, the expositions were about two men’s belief, basically they were monologues. I am providing some details of the men below, frankly I could clearly see how these two men could be obsessed with their own views, they see themselves as very important person and don’t downplay their pair’s opinion as unrelated and something out of the context.

Some of the dialogues went very well if you look at the Serbian dialogue, they have done so much. Every night they have written quite a bit to each other. I am really disappointed to see that Rahraw only made one posting to Shapur, in badly broken English. They are clearly missing the point of art. It’s about expression and communication, which is best possible in a language you are fluent in. why aren’t they communicating in Farsi or Pashtu?

From Afghanistan was Rahraw Amarzad livening in Kabul was paired with Shapur Amini living in London.

Shapur was born on October 11, 1962 in Kabul. After graduating from Ghazi high school, he was offered a scholarship to study Photography, Television and Cinema in Tehran, Iran. Only a few months after my arrival in Iran, the communist coup took place in Afghanistan.

With the coming of many Afghans to the United Kingdom and the lack of Afghan organisations to assist them, in October 1991 he formed a community group called Afghan Academy, an educational, cultural and social organisation.

Rahraw Amarzad was born in 1964 in Kabul, where he continued to live and work as an artist, curator and lecturer.

He is the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Afghanistan, Lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts Kabul University and Editor in Chief of Gahnama-e-Hunar Art Magazine.

I think the reason the Afghans were held back is because the dialogue was public, therefore they have to hide some things and communicate in a language understandable for audience.

I like the dialogue between the Iraqis, it’s very tender and you can see how their point of view has changed. This is again not the case with Afghans. perhaps its between a woman and a man. i don't think its a good idea to put two muslim men together, espicially Afghan. its hard for them to open up.